Monday, May 4, 2009

I love the travel blogosphere because collectively we have so much to offer, given the number of brainiacs, analysts and muckrakers out there who are contributing to our travel industry knowledge base.

In perusing some recent posts and tweets, I see that Tom Botts of the Hudson Crossing Travel Industry Insight blog points out that Delta and Northwest brought back 500 bonus miles for online bookings, and Botts puts the move in the context of these airlines trying to restore some juice now that the online travel agencies have eliminated booking fees on flights.

Then there is the Susan Black Associates blog, which yesterday graded a few major travel players on their social-media responses to the swine flu. While Black handed out an A+ to Funjet Vacations, Travelocity and Expedia may have to stay after school because these two OTAs brought home grades of C.

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I've followed online travel, its twists, turns and detours, since the beginning (not Adam and Eve, but Rich and Terry), and will follow the aforesaid in this blog. I'm North America editor of Tnooz and I write USA Today's Digital Traveler column. Things not in my resume: I visited Orbitz headquarters pre-launch in 2000 and, left unattended, eavesdropped and examined the whiteboards to learn partnership details; Travelocity's ex-CEO Michelle Peluso credits me with her success (Wharton notwithstanding) after I wrote a sentence (with accompanying photo) mentioning that some of her Site59 women wore fishnet stockings and then airline execs kept the phone lines busy; I once drove to tiny Sherman, Conn., to see where PhoCusWright lives; and I was a nachtportier in a West Berlin hotel in the days (Btw) when a nasty wall split the city. Fyi, the previous stuff wasn't necessarily in chronological order.

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The opinions I express in the Dennis Schaal Blog are my own. Only I could think of this stuff. The opinions uttered or written here in no way reflect on the views of past employers, current partners, future associations (how could they anyway?) or my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Slayton. I don't have a lawyer, but if I had one, he or she probably would have told me to write something like this. Well, maybe not exactly. The Dennis Schaal Blog is Copyright (c) 2009 by Dennis Schaal. All rights reserved.